What do you think?
Rate this book
Doctor Who: The Satan Pit
DOCTOR THE SATAN PIT
The Doctor and Rose travel to Krop Tor – an impossible planet orbiting a black hole, defying the laws of physics. With the TARDIS lost to them, trapped with a crew of human explorers and their alien servants, the Ood, they find ancient ruins... and something far older and darker stirring beneath the surface.
Whispers speak of a malevolent force imprisoned since before time – something that even the Doctor fears. As seismic horrors rise and minds begin to fracture, one terrifying question What if the Devil is real?
Screenwriter Matt Jones presents an inspired and novel retelling of his own two-part adventure from David Tennant’s first season as the Tenth Doctor, also starring Billie Piper as Rose.
The Doctor and Rose travel to Krop Tor – an impossible planet orbiting a black hole, defying the laws of physics. With the TARDIS lost to them, trapped with a crew of human explorers and their alien servants, the Ood, they find ancient ruins... and something far older and darker stirring beneath the surface.
Whispers speak of a malevolent force imprisoned since before time – something that even the Doctor fears. As seismic horrors rise and minds begin to fracture, one terrifying question What if the Devil is real?
Screenwriter Matt Jones presents an inspired and novel retelling of his own two-part adventure from David Tennant’s first season as the Tenth Doctor, also starring Billie Piper as Rose.
- GenresDoctor Who
Kindle Edition
Published March 26, 2026
About the author
Matt Jones
79 books5 followersThere is more than one author with this name on Goodreads
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Read
April 9, 2026The Satan Pit is probably my favourite Doctor Who episode ever so when the novelization was announced I pre-ordered it pretty much immediately. Unfortunately I was quite disappointed by how they handled the narration - I'd have been happy to read the POV of the side characters for some of it but having basically the entire story told from the perspectives of Ida, Danny, and Zack made me feel robbed when it came to some of the moments between the Doctor and Rose, especially because this story is so crucial to their relationship. Matt Jones also had to come up with so many strange ways to include the important scenes that didn't include any of the 3 narrators and it kinda felt like he was jumping through hoops to do so. This is also a small nitpick (but to me it's very serious) but I didn't like how they changed the implications about Ida's relationship with her father (and mother by extension), the suggestions of the nature of that situation always felt very powerful to me in the episode and to change it to something arguably much less dark really disappointed me. The climactic scene near the end was beautiful A++ no notes but I wish it hadn't taken so long for me to feel truly gripped by the story, especially considering I already felt such strong emotions about it going in. I really would have preferred that Matt Jones had refrained from doing anything fancy and had just stuck to the original structure of the episode, which I truly believe is one of the best television stories ever created.
March 26, 2026
I wasn't initially convinced by the framing device of the interview and trial, but throughout I thought that it was weaved very well throughout the story, adding depth to the story seen on screen, fleshing out who everyone was and how they reacted to the events on the base. Another top class Target Novelisation of one of my favourite episodes.
March 30, 2026
The Doctor and Rose arrive at Krop-Tor, a human expedition to investigate a black hole, and discover an ancient evil trapped there, awaiting its chance to escape.
Jones, who introduced the Ood into the Whoniverse, chooses an interesting narrative style which really works to sell the story on the page.
Jones, who introduced the Ood into the Whoniverse, chooses an interesting narrative style which really works to sell the story on the page.
April 13, 2026
Narratively one of the worst target novels I’ve read. Though the later half of the book gets better, I feel like having it as interviews and from the perspective of characters of that episode really missed the mark. So many untold perspectives missed out. The addition were great though one in particular fell flat for me. Overall, just watch the episodes.
April 23, 2026
It’s no secret that the BBC decision to continue novelizations of the revival is one mainly aimed at the fans of Doctor Who. The home media market already started to make the novelizations at least partially obsolete in the late 1980s, and by the time of the revival in 2005 and streaming video being just around the corner, there was no reason to really continue them. That means that often the best of these revival novelizations do something to set themselves apart from just a standard retelling of the original episode. Matt Jones’ The Satan Pit takes the approach of not centering the Doctor and Rose, instead telling the story near exclusively after the fact from the perspective of the three survivors with one interlude, placed just after the adaptation of “The Impossible Planet” from the perspectives of the detective and corporate representative interrogating our protagonists, and one scene from the perspective of the Doctor for the actual confrontation with the Beast. That latter scene is the closest the novel gets to Jones just taking the script and translating it into straight prose, though he is very much interested in exploring the Doctor’s love of Rose Tyler through subtle amendments to the dialogue tags, channeling David Tennant’s performance into the prose. This should annoy me, the Doctor in my mind should be an asexual character, however, Jones sells it particularly well because it’s one of those romances where “I love you” isn’t actually said. There’s also the insecurity that the Doctor isn’t able to get Rose back home, he did promise her mother and it is eating him up from the inside. Jones makes it explicit that the Beast is psychically enhancing everybody’s fears and trauma’s on the base, including the Doctor emphasizing the Doctor as fallable but not human. His mind may work differently, but he is against something far bigger than him.
Jones is also careful about when he gives the Doctor his scene, instead of putting it in chronological order, it’s moved towards the end. Ida, Danny, and Zach have actually finished their individual interrogations and we as the audience see a portion of their trial. For the reader this has the effect of a mysterious resolution, theoretically we don’t know exactly how they got out, especially Ida who was unconscious for the climax of the story. There was a possibility of ending it before the trial, and letting the audience not know the fate of the three, even if Big Finish Productions have brought them all back in their Torchwood range. The trial sequence does make up for it in general. Jones brings in ideas from “Planet of the Ood”, that the Ood are actually freed by the Doctor and Donna in between the end of “The Satan Pit” and the survivors making it back to Earth, and The End of Time, with the psychic link of the Ood to the Doctor specifically near the end of his life and the visit to people the Tenth Doctor had previously met included as an epilogue.
The Satan Pit’s worldbuilding is its biggest success. Because we are in the heads of the supporting characters, many of the scenes that are just the Doctor and Rose that couldn’t be overheard are either omitted completely or are trimmed down to what could theoretically be on security cameras. This makes the pair more distant and the supporting characters, especially Ida and Danny, as our real humans here. Their traumas are always just below the surface of the mind, the Beast bringing them there for as long as they’ve been on the base, even before the beginning of the story. It also adds this pressure of a society not so much on the brink of collapse, but one built on a capitalistic empire. The interrogations take the events of the story as ridiculous, something cooked up between the three survivors for some unknown and frankly impossible game. Jones uses it to reflect the current system of capitalism, stretched quite thin while being under the thumb of corporations who only care about the capital and not the human life. Jones also posits an almost religious like fanaticism forming around the Doctor because of the destruction of property which while slightly silly feels almost like a commentary on certain aspects of internet culture.
Overall, The Satan Pit is a riveting read. There is a sense that Jones isn’t actually writing for Doctor Who fans, which makes sense as he has written books that are meant to be for the general public even if they were technically spin-offs. Swapping out the protagonists means the novel is a fundamentally different experience, with the focus on different aspects of the story and the society in which it is set and reflecting upon. It changes much of the horror to work in the prose setting over two episodes of television. 10/10.
Jones is also careful about when he gives the Doctor his scene, instead of putting it in chronological order, it’s moved towards the end. Ida, Danny, and Zach have actually finished their individual interrogations and we as the audience see a portion of their trial. For the reader this has the effect of a mysterious resolution, theoretically we don’t know exactly how they got out, especially Ida who was unconscious for the climax of the story. There was a possibility of ending it before the trial, and letting the audience not know the fate of the three, even if Big Finish Productions have brought them all back in their Torchwood range. The trial sequence does make up for it in general. Jones brings in ideas from “Planet of the Ood”, that the Ood are actually freed by the Doctor and Donna in between the end of “The Satan Pit” and the survivors making it back to Earth, and The End of Time, with the psychic link of the Ood to the Doctor specifically near the end of his life and the visit to people the Tenth Doctor had previously met included as an epilogue.
The Satan Pit’s worldbuilding is its biggest success. Because we are in the heads of the supporting characters, many of the scenes that are just the Doctor and Rose that couldn’t be overheard are either omitted completely or are trimmed down to what could theoretically be on security cameras. This makes the pair more distant and the supporting characters, especially Ida and Danny, as our real humans here. Their traumas are always just below the surface of the mind, the Beast bringing them there for as long as they’ve been on the base, even before the beginning of the story. It also adds this pressure of a society not so much on the brink of collapse, but one built on a capitalistic empire. The interrogations take the events of the story as ridiculous, something cooked up between the three survivors for some unknown and frankly impossible game. Jones uses it to reflect the current system of capitalism, stretched quite thin while being under the thumb of corporations who only care about the capital and not the human life. Jones also posits an almost religious like fanaticism forming around the Doctor because of the destruction of property which while slightly silly feels almost like a commentary on certain aspects of internet culture.
Overall, The Satan Pit is a riveting read. There is a sense that Jones isn’t actually writing for Doctor Who fans, which makes sense as he has written books that are meant to be for the general public even if they were technically spin-offs. Swapping out the protagonists means the novel is a fundamentally different experience, with the focus on different aspects of the story and the society in which it is set and reflecting upon. It changes much of the horror to work in the prose setting over two episodes of television. 10/10.
May 11, 2026
I was SO happy to see that there was some new target books and of some of the fantastic earlier series. There’s plenty of the newer ones with Ncuti but the ones with the 9, 10 & 11th Doc are fewer and far between. AND we get the Satan Pit / Impossible Planet which was amongst my absolute favourites of all time.
What was so great about this one too and what made it so novel was that it was a retelling of the episode, written in a different way with different perspectives and a whole new vantage point (plus written by the same writer who wrote the episodes so it really felt like it was in good hands).
I enjoyed this book so much - both revisiting the episode and seeing it in a whole new light. We get new added bits of extras and snippets in between and beyond which just made the whole book so fab. I think I’ll also listen to this in the audiobook format too as I think that’s bound to be an entertaining listen (with all the original actors coming back to voice their respective parts). I can’t wait to read the other two that have come out recently (The Aliens of London and The Time of Angels), I’m keeping my fingers crossed there will be more to come from the earlier series!
What was so great about this one too and what made it so novel was that it was a retelling of the episode, written in a different way with different perspectives and a whole new vantage point (plus written by the same writer who wrote the episodes so it really felt like it was in good hands).
I enjoyed this book so much - both revisiting the episode and seeing it in a whole new light. We get new added bits of extras and snippets in between and beyond which just made the whole book so fab. I think I’ll also listen to this in the audiobook format too as I think that’s bound to be an entertaining listen (with all the original actors coming back to voice their respective parts). I can’t wait to read the other two that have come out recently (The Aliens of London and The Time of Angels), I’m keeping my fingers crossed there will be more to come from the earlier series!
May 4, 2026
The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit are two of my favourite episodes of modern Doctor Who, giving a modern twist to the classic base-under-siege story. Matt Jones has captured the twists, turns and thrills of his original scripts and added useful exposition that ties the novelisation to the events that will follow in and The End of Time.
If there is anything wrong with the adaptation it is the somewhat contrived framing of an investigation into the loss of the Sanctuary Base that is the location of the story. Presenting the tale as witness statements from the survivors robs the reader of the growing menace of the possessed Ood. It also leads to a highly contrived resolution for the story as there is no one other than the Doctor present in the climatic scenes - which, unless I missed it, also lack the important point of how the TARDIS is recovered.
It's a decent read, but could have been better.
If there is anything wrong with the adaptation it is the somewhat contrived framing of an investigation into the loss of the Sanctuary Base that is the location of the story. Presenting the tale as witness statements from the survivors robs the reader of the growing menace of the possessed Ood. It also leads to a highly contrived resolution for the story as there is no one other than the Doctor present in the climatic scenes - which, unless I missed it, also lack the important point of how the TARDIS is recovered.
It's a decent read, but could have been better.
April 5, 2026
I've never been a massive fan of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit two-part TV story. I'm not sure why. Possibly because, like all the space ship/space station-based early new series series, all just looked one step too far beyond its budget.
But that is not an issue here, and Matt Jones has done an excellent job of transferring the episodes to the page. He's taken liberties with the standard Target form which haven't been seen since Donald Cotton's fantastic Hartnell novelisations. And like those books this goes straight into the top 10 Targets for me.
But that is not an issue here, and Matt Jones has done an excellent job of transferring the episodes to the page. He's taken liberties with the standard Target form which haven't been seen since Donald Cotton's fantastic Hartnell novelisations. And like those books this goes straight into the top 10 Targets for me.
April 2, 2026
A great fast read novelisation of the TV story. Not much changes in part 1, besides the obvious, being that the story is now told in the form of testimonies from the three survivors from sanctuary base rather than in the third person. There’s a few changes that come in with part 2, and you get to learn about the Ood after the events of ‘Planet of the Ood’, which is a good touch. The last few pages are a great addition to the story.
May 13, 2026
Converting a tv story to a series of first person narratives creates a few clunky turns, loses some things and adds others, but it was great to try something different. It was interesting to hear what happened when the crew reached home, especially the very final section. We even get a bit of first person Doctor, a rarity.
April 1, 2026
SO GOOD.
The narrative style was such a brave choice that initially threw me off, but it really works. The additional scenes from the court room brought me to tears. Loved this.
The narrative style was such a brave choice that initially threw me off, but it really works. The additional scenes from the court room brought me to tears. Loved this.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews